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Moose-taken Identity's Journal

18th September, 2008. 9:40 am. I sot the serif

I found this site, http://type.salsen.com/, which consists of typography jokes. At first, it just seemed lame, but as I read on, I started to find it funny in a charming way, like discovering a cargo cult.

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29th December, 2007. 6:37 pm.

I've been having some fun the last few days playing flash-based point and click games. These are the sort of things where you explore a space, collecting and combining objects, solving puzzles and so on. Many of them take the form of escaping from a locked room. There's an excellent annotated list of these games at http://jayisgames.com/tag/pointandclick. Quite a few suffer from poor user interfaces, for example requiring you to find an unmarked region of a pixels and click on it, or from apparently arbitrary actions with the objects you find. The best are very good: so far, my top recommendations are the submachine series, and MOTAS, both of which have a good UI and challenging but solvable puzzles. You'll find links to these on the jayisgames page. Although not really part of the same genre, roomz (http://www.theroomz.yoyo.pl/) is also good. It might appeal to the kind of people who were doing qwyzzle a year or so back.

I've never written anything using flash, and I'm tempted to use this genre as a reason to try doing so. The best games have good artwork and clever plotting, neither of which I can emulate, though it shouldn't be too hard to knock something together. The cost of the Adobe Flash studio is outrageous, though there are some cheaper alternatives if you don't mind getting an older version of flash.

Current mood: geeky.

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24th October, 2007. 8:05 am. The Southern California Fires

Just in case anyone wanted to know...

We've not been affected by the Southern California fires, other than getting some poor air quality (which may be just from the Santa Ana winds, rather than the fires specifically). I do have friends in San Diego who have been evacuated, and in one case has probably lost his house.

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28th September, 2007. 8:24 pm.

If you've not read Stephen Fry's blog, at http://www.stephenfry.com/blog, go and do so straight away. It is wonderful.

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19th June, 2007. 4:06 pm.

This (http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/136048main_bm_012004.jpg?) is an incredibly striking picture. It really shows how much the gulf stream contributes to the climate of the UK and North West Europe.

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28th April, 2007. 5:13 pm. A very utile accouterment that many people bury

This (http://www.digital-cameras-group.info/2007/04/18/the-top-pentad-tips-for-pickings-your-digital-camera-on-holiday/) must surely be the result of bad machine translation (or bad OCR).

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3rd April, 2007. 11:48 am.

On Abbot Kinney in Venice, I saw a shop which I rather liked. It's called ADHD, which stands for Art Decor Home Design. Their slogan: why start one project when you can almost finish three?

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14th January, 2007. 11:08 pm.

If you've ever wanted to simulate pig diseases, go here: http://www.thepigsite.com/diseaseinfo/problemsolver.php. I know you probably haven't ever had this urge, but just in case. The site might also help you if you are looking for a job in the pig industry.

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26th September, 2006. 5:43 pm. Well, that'll stop them

My esoteric and rather pointless PhD thesis concentrated on the semantics of quantification and anaphora, something which can be seen in so-called donkey sentences such as Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. Discussion of such sentences originates with mediaeval philosophers, although I observed in a footnote that the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos discusses related sentences such as If a man is in Athens, he is not in Rhodes. So I was rather pleased to see in a web page on strange deaths (at http://www.digital-karma.org/culture/facts/list-of-unusual-deaths) the following:

207 BC: Chrysippus, Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after watching his drunken donkey attempt to eat figs.

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21st September, 2006. 1:41 pm.

I am amazed at the total uselessness of many US taxi drivers. I've had this experience in Boston, LA and San Francisco of drivers who (a) do not know how to get anywhere and (b) do no understand directions. Witness a taxi ride I had back from LAX to my home today (Yellow Cab #6694 in case anyone wants to know). It's about 4 miles: get onto Lincoln (he managed this), left of Washington (likewise, both of these being major streets). So then we get to a light and I tell him go through the light and take the next right. "Go left?" he says. No, through the light, then next right. He goes throught the light, ignores the turn. OK, take the *next* right. Ignores it. We come to the next light. He's in the right hand land. Right! I say... and he goes straight on. At this point I give up, tell him to stop and walk the rest of the way. This is the worst experience I've had, though there have been others than come close.

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